Posts Tagged ‘convergence’

Our traditionalist is now beginning to worry, but he will grant this one last point pour mieux sauter. OK, the very first Cambrian fauna included a plethora of alternative possibilities, all equally sensible and none leading to us. But, surely, once the modern fauna arose in the next phase of the Cambrian, called Atdabanian after another Russian locality, then the boundaries and channels were finally set. The arrival of trilobites, those familiar symbols of the Cambrian, must mark the end of craziness and the inception of predictability. Let the good times roll.

This book is quite long enough already, and you do not want a “second verse, same as the first.” I merely point out that the Burgess Shale represents the early and maximal extent of the Atdabanian radiation. The story of the Burgess Shale is the tale of life itself, not a unique and peculiar episode of possibilities gone wild. – SJ Gould Wonderful Life (1989)

The first god had, in his garden, one of these I'm sure. Ordovician marrellomorph from the cover of this week's Nature / Van Roy et al. 2010. A strong contender for my next paleo-ink.

About Wonderful Life and Crucible of Creation. About broken molds and Technicolor films. About checking the guy’s rock record and replaying life’s wobbly mistracked tape.

this is what the late eighties was like

[I biked over the library after Schluter’s talk and grabbed some books. “That’s a small book,” the librarian remarked about the paperback version of WL, recut into hardback form, “but I’m sure it’s filled with big ideas”]

And ultimately about how, really, all of this maybe shows not so much about the fickle nature of history or the inevitability of intelligence or even about foolish it is to draw deep philosophical lessons from a crappy fossil record. But that, well, the Earth was a really weird place 550, 450, 250, 50, 5 million years ago and that we have a lot more surprises in store and a lot more to learn. But we will, in fits and starts, and what we do discover will change our picture of our place in the universe. Or maybe it won’t.

[I hit delete.]

Because it’s Friday afternoon, and that all sounds pretty damn pretentious and sappy and inconclusive. Why not throw together a link-heavy meta-post [I thought], then sit back and watch the links decay over the years until all that’s left is an ambiguous smear that’s difficult to make any sense of.

In a statement released today Hypselorhachis asserts that the passing reference to “an early sail-backed dinosaur” in the caption of an illustration that accompanied the article was, “an underhanded attempt to smear my character and associate me with unsavory elements.”

“I just don’t understand. They could have called me a ‘ctenosauriscid‘ a ‘poposaur‘ a ‘rauisuchian‘ a ‘pseudosuchian‘ a ‘crurotarsan‘ even an ‘archosaur’ without dragging my name through the gutter like this. Hell, I would even have been fine with ‘hellasaur.’ But ‘dinosaur‘? That’s just not right. Someone has to put a stop to this sort of thing.”

Strange Bedfellows

The crusade has attracted some surprising allies. Dimetrodon,a sail-backed synapsid from the Permian, has previously accused Hypselorhachis of being an “imposter,” a “total ripoff” and “less-original than Spinosaurus, really.”

Tensions between the two extinct animals flared last summer when Kanye West interrupted Dimetrodon’s acceptance speech at the “Virgin Teen’s Choice Awards” for the category “Best Backbone.” West grabbed the microphone saying, “Congratulations D’meet and I’mma let you finish, but Hypselorhachis had the best elongated neural arches of ALL TIME.”

In spite of the rivalry, Dimetrodon defends the merits of the lawsuit. “As a frequent victim of false-dinosaur defamation, I wholeheartedly support Hypselorhachis on this one. We non-dinosaurs have to stick together.” Dimetrodon says that it will donate the proceeds from sales of its popular T-shirt to the Hypselorhachis legal defense fund.

Several pterosaurs and marine reptiles have also voiced their support for Hypselorhachis. National Geographic was not available for comment.

Um so rather than plagiarize the press-release here are some random, certainly minor, musings as I sit in 100 F Davis, CA and ponder freshwater proto-seals frolicking in a balmy Arctic lake one million score years ago today…

The pace of important fossil discoveries at high latitudes (including Antarctica and Spitsbergen as well as Greenland, Nunavut, and Siberia) has seemed to quicken–Tiktaalik and Kryostega providing just two recent, high-profile examples.

So far this has probably been driven by technological advances that make it easier to get to these remote locations and work under polar conditions. However, given recent climatic projections it’s interesting to wonder how a reduction in ice at the poles might affect polar paleontology. Not only might the recession of glaciers expose fossil bearing strata, but reduction of ice on land and sea might permit easier access to known localities.

I certainly don’t mean this as some kind of apologia for anthropogenic warming of the planet–obviously any paleontological rewards will likely come at deep expense to the living ecosystems in these regions. And rising global sea-levels might destroy important existing coastal fossil localities. Even under the most optimistic scenarios however, we will almost certainly sea a waning of ice at least in the Arctic. Indeed, despite of truth-bending denials by folks like George Will it’s already happening. It will be interesting, in a sick, doom-filled, quasi-Lovecraftian way to watch how a changing climate might reveal new secrets of our past…even if we don’t turn up evidence of a lost race of sentient malicious Paleozoic invertebrates.

Damn! I knew I should have taken Inuktikut instead of Latin

For a while now, I have been interested in the introgression of nonIndo-European languages into taxonomic nomenclature, especially those that derive from “indigenous” cultures (whatever that means…) Like Tiktaalik, “Puijila” is of Inuktikut origin, in this case referring to a small seal. Tiktaalik means “burbot”, a type of fish. I am, for the record, wholly in favor of this practice but if I was writing a paper about this in college I would probably raise the question of whether this amounted to some form of “cultural appropriation.” Incidentally, I like the fact that Puijila has some vague phonic resonance with the names of extant northern hemisphere seals (or phocine phocid phocoids for those of you keeping score at home) Phoca, Pusa, Pagophilus, Histriophoca. Whatever.

Tilt-shift maker is a fun, and easy to use website that allows you to simulate the effect (albeit imperfectly) on your own photos or things you find on the web. I knew there was a reason I was taking so many photos of rooftops while I was in China… (click for larger versions)

Many have pondered the reception of the steady stream of e-m message bottles we’ve been casting into the cosmic lagoon for a century or so. What are the aliens making of The Honeymooners, The Brady Bunch, the numbers stations, That 70s Show? Are they amused? perplexed? outraged?

The best, I suppose that we can hope for is that they might find some sense of aesthetic beauty in the radiation pouring off our planet–as we get from the flash of a lampyrid; a solar glint off the gorget of hummingbird or the belly of lizard. Beautiful and stripped of meaning.

The worst is that they might eventually swing by and try to clean up the stain.

On an autumn afternoon, Earl Wadsworth climbed up to the top of a ledge in a remote slot canyon in Nevada. With a knife or a nail or some other tool Earl scratched a large cursive “E” into the limestone wall. After some consideration the graffiti-artist gave up on the formal script and printed his full name across the rock.